Recently I contributed an article on the misconceptions of giants in ancient Egypt. That article can be found here. One should think that common sense alone would bring a halt to such beliefs before they fester, but this is not always so in the world of alternative and fringe ideas.

A reader name nonesense wrote a very long comment, and frankly I believe it is too long and rambling to leave intact at the end of my A Giant Misconception article. It might discourage others from commenting. But rather than just deleting nonesense’s comment, which was my first inclination, I thought I would write this article in response to it. If nothing else, nonesense’s full comment will give reader’s a rather vivid and unconcealed (if not shocking) dose of the world of the fringe.

I believe I’ve encountered nonesense before. I’m a Moderator and poster at a message borad called Unexplained-Mysteries, and I am almost positive nonesense has posted there under the name “egyptian lad.” He initially took part in a couple of discussions about ancient Egypt in which he introduced his beliefs about ancient giants, and then started his own forum thread for a more inclusive discussion on the subject. You can peruse it in this link.

You be the judge: are nonesense and egyptian lad the same person? It’s entirely possible. Nor would it be surprising. In the signature area of my own posts at Unexplained-Mysteries, there is a link to my blog. And I must be honest about something: it is egyptian lad’s strange brand of “beliefs” about ancient giants that inspired me to write my article on the misconceptions about giants. In my ongoing battles against the fringe, I’ve found inspiration more than once on that message board.

What follows is nonesense’s comment, in full. I’ll be removing nearly all of it from the comments section below my Giants article, so it will now live here:

because there is a conspiracy run, So this truth of giants will remain hidden, its forbidden archaeology, they are hypocrite, Actually the aim lies in Saving the old biology sciences from denial and collapse, If Giant Humans truth appeared, Then Evolution,darwinism is wrong….Then Dinasours would be actually skeletons of Giant Animals who lived in the same age of Giant humans….its complicated matter.

The archaeologists fabricated most ancient artifacts and monuments in egypt,they removed entire chapter of ancient egypt history.

Most pharaoh kings/queens are fake……most dynasties are made up and they put king so to belong in age so and so.

They limited the age of ancient egypt to fit the pharaohes era, Ancient egypt is actually older ancient place in the world,The sphinx and pyramids maybe over 20,000 b.c.

The mummification is one of the biggest lies they invented.

There are Giant Human Mummies in egypt but hidden untill today, addition to giant sarcophaguses and coffins, its forbidden by archaeologists , they only show the stuff of people of our size and claim that those were the builders of egypt by lies and hypocrisy.

On the german newspaper bild, there is an article about Giant finger stolen from the graves around the giza pyramids, the finger was 38 cm….u of course going to say its fake images and photoshoped as usual, Around the giza pyramids and pyramids of egypt generally, there are many high graves, they call it mastabas, these mastabas are numerous and full of giants skeletons and mummies….Untill now, they are locked up by archaeologists and only legalized guys of the conspiracy allowed to enter it.

Many locations too are banned, and there are artifacts stores, You or Me or Any visiter not allowed to enter it, they only pick up things from the artifacts to show for the publicity and claim that it was for king so…..to create another legend from their imagination.

Hence, u put Anubis God image,The ancient egyptians didnt record anything about mummifaction, Look at the arts of so called mummifaction action, it was the God of afterlife or death, Anubis making check on the coffin of dead……..its a spiritual action by their god rather than mummification work.

Plus: Mummies have been found world wide and everywhere, its not a science….Its nature work…..if u believer in god, Its God’s work, God saved some dead bodies of people unrotten which we call mummy now.

Someone would say YOU ARE MAD? then who wrapped them into the cloth sheet and put into the coffins and sarcophaguses?

My Answer:

some people from the old times or the early british archaeologists run a big game over ancient egypt,They replaced the bones of kings that were in coffins and sarcophaguses and put the unrotten dead bodies of unknown people to claim it was king so and king so.

Actually todays,If you open the modern egyptians’s graves, you gonna find mummies of modern egyptians, Its all nature work!….the stories are many about modern egyptians, people continuously find unrotten dead bodies inside graves of modern egyptians. Of course they create superstition about it, thats its angel work and that guy is connect to god and so.

On 1898: Mummy was found in the area of jabalain of red sea.

The archaeologists rushed to take this mummy and wrap iby clothed sheet and put in coffin, to claim it was mummy of king so and so, While this mummy actually is for unknown person.

Its now put in the egyptian museum and of course named by one of pharaoh kings.

for your knowledge too: most pharaoh mummies were diseased, those dead people had no medicine to get cure.

So logically, they reach a mummification science while they were suffering of diseases and so backward on medicine?

today, the scientists play by genes of humans and went so far on medicine and still no one can mummify a dead body of any president or guy for more than 2 century

There is surely nothin called mummification science, its lies of archaeologists the cheaters who fabricated everything.

the truth will be revealed on the future, Actually ancient history must be re-written cuz its all false and wrong and lies.

So, then, what follows is a response to and critique of some of the things nonesense included in his comment. We, again, shall turn to real-world evidence and what it can tell us.

Nonesense opens with the conspiracy angle: archaeology is trying to hide “the truth” from all of us. If you’ve read my Giants article or the article I wrote called Tactics of the Fringe, you’ll understand why I cannot for a moment take such a charge seriously. This would require us to believe that all archaeologists and historians and related specialists have been working in perfect concert for two centuries with all academic institutions involved in pharaonic studies, to conceal giants from us. It is a patently silly if not plainly ludicrous notion. This is not how the real world works, so we needn’t take such a charge seriously to begin with.

The one thing about which nonesense wrote on the conspiracy idea that I will comment on, is his belief that archaeologists have replaced the original “bones of the kings” with the “unrotten dead bodies of unknown people.” This strikes me as odd, naturally. For one thing, the original sarcophagi of kings have been found almost always empty. Many kings such as Tuthmosis III and Ramesses II were found in the late nineteenth century in secondary tombs and caches, and in reused coffins, such as in the famed tomb known as DB320 (or TT320). In most cases the original coffins of great kings are lost to history.

Moreover, what is the source of all of the bodies with which the “bones of the kings” were swapped? Were archaeologists raiding nearby Muslim cemeteries? Did the local inhabitants of the villages not mind this practice? Also, if the orignal bones were swapped with modern bodies, I guess the original bones didn’t belong to giants if the replacement bodies fit so well in the ancient sarcophagi and coffins, reused or not.

Before moving on, I must also point out a salient question: If modern archaeologists have been so overwhelmingly successful in hiding “the truth” from all of us, how is it that conspiracy fans like nonesense know so much about it? This alone always leaves me chuckling. “No, archaeologists have hidden everything but I just happen to know the truth!”

Let’s look at some other points nonesense brought up. For example, nonesense claimed “most dynasties are made up and they put king so to belong in age so and so.” This sort of statement reveals the average fringe proponent’s lack of even basic familiarity not only with the field of Egyptology but with pharaonic history in general. Modern historians did not devise the system of dynasties into which pharaonic history is divided. For this we have to travel all the way back to the third century BCE and the Egyptian priest Manetho, who was commissioned by his Ptolemaic rulers to write a history of his nation. None of Manetho’s original work, Aegyptiaca, survives but fortunately he was extensively quoted by other writers of late antiquity, most notably the Jewish historian Josephus (see Against Apion). Manethos is the person who devised the dynastic system still used by Egyptology today, although it has undergone some minor revisions. It is modern Egyptology which has created the broader kingdom periods such as Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom in which Manetho’s dynasty system now resides.

Nonesense is also certain that “archaeologists fabricated most ancient artifacts and monuments in egypt.” Considering the tens of thousands of pharaonic monuments now scattered around the world in a great many museums—stelae, statues, sections of tombs and temples, figurines, coffins, sarcophagi, canopic jars and chests, et cetera—such a statement is not remotely realistic. Not only does this imply that archaeologists have been awfully damn busy in workshops in the past two centuries, it also presupposes that they’ve invented the practically countless inscriptions and religious texts and biographical accounts such monuments contain. Goodness, is nothing about ancient Egypt authentic?

Astonishingly, this would also have to include the surviving and standing monuments and temples and tombs with their great body of inscribed material.

Nonesense mentions a “giant finger” found at Giza. This was actually the topic of a discussion at the Unexplained-Mysteries board and, I believe, the first one in which egyptian lad (whom I’m convinced is nonesesne) participated as a poster. He probably missed the fact that nearly all of us were having a good laugh in that thread over what is clearly a clumsy and ridiculous hoax. It’s the sort of obvious hoax that clutters the internet.

In the same paragraph nonesense mentions the mastaba tombs of Giza. There are many at that necropolis alone, not to mention a great many others scattered throughout numerous other Old Kingdom necropoli in the Nile Valley. Supposedly these were for the burials of giants. I would invite the reader to visit the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s digital library for the Giza Mastaba Series. Many of the mastabas at Giza have been excavated several times, and many of these excavations have been published on the MFA’s web page. You can download them as free PDFs. They’re not exactly thrilling reading, but if you like to visit the real world of archaeology and gain an understanding of what archaeology can reveal, these are great resources. I’ve read all of these reports and check back now and then to see if new ones are available (the page is updated when new material is prepared), and to date I haven’t read anything about giants. Then again, the archaeologists are supposed to be lying. Of course.

Nonesense charges that these mastaba tombs are locked shut and hidden from the public. Some such tombs are, generally because they’re so ancient that they’re not safe for tourists to explore. Most, however, are not locked. In fact, you can enter and explore many of them. It’s called tourism.

Nonesense also comments that the Giza pyramids and the Great Sphinx are over 20,000 years old (“over 20,000 b.c.,” in his words). As I’ve reported in other articles, carbon dating of mortar samples from these pyramids shows they cannot be older than perhaps a century than conventionally thought. This means the Great Pyramid, for example, might have been built around 2600 BCE instead of 2500 BCE. That’s entirely possible, but 20,000 years ago? Of course not. As for the Sphinx, the continued excavations, geological surveys, and other avenues of research conducted by the Giza Plateau Mapping Project have demonstrated that the Sphinx does, indeed, date to the pyramid complex of Khafre, who built the second Giza pyramid. In other words, the Sphinx also was prepared around 2500 BCE (or 2600 BCE).

My own favorite comments of nonesense pertain to mummification. Nonesense would have us believe that the ancient Egyptians did not artificially mummify but that all mummified bodies are the product of Mother Nature.

Nonesense is the only person I’ve come across who makes this claim. It strikes me as bizarre, given the massive body of evidence from pharaonic Egypt for artificial mummification. It can be tracked in crude attempts all the way back to the prehistoric site of Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, where bodies were carefully wrapped and smeared with resins—this was over 5,000 years ago.

I have to ask, if Mother Nature did all of the work, how did that clever gal not only dry out bodies but eviscerate many thousands of extant examples to remove their internal organs and excerabrate to remove their brains? Was it Mother Nature who not only did this but carved the canopic jars in which the internal organs were stored? And with the late-period mummies, after the point when the jars were no longer used, did Mother Nature not only dry the organs but carefully wrap them and re-introduce them into the abdominal-thoracic cavity? Clever gal, indeed.

Just to be clear on this, the ancient embalmers slit the lower-left flank (in most cases) to reach in and cut out the internal organs: stomach, liver, lungs, and intestines. If you study the photos of ancient Egyptian mummies, you will often see this slit in their left sides. The incisions were originally only about the size of a fist, but over time they tore on many mummies to the extant that they look like huge gashes today. And on the subject of excerabration (the technical modern term for the removal of the brain), this was most often done by breaking through the ethmoid bone behind the eyes, scrambling the brain matter into a paste, and withdrawing it in semi-liquified blobs through the nostril. So obviously, with both evisceration and excerabration, Mother Nature had nothing to do with it. Regardless of how clever she is.

Nonesense claims that the ancient Egyptians did not “record anything about mummification.” This is not correct. Plenty of ancient Egyptian texts provide all sorts of information about mummification procedures and protocols. This includes contracts and agreements between embalmers and their clients, as well as papyrus texts found in the Ptolemaic Period tomb of a family of embalmers—these papyri preserve numerous details, such as leaving the body in natron for a period of 35 days instead of the customary 40 days observed in other, older periods. Also preserved is a sort of “grocery list” containing the specific ingredients and materials embalmers would need to mummify a body.

The one point on which nonesense is correct is that no surviving text or inscription lists the specific steps for physically performing a mummification. It seems most embalmer’s workshops were family businesses, and these families were probably keen on protecting their trade secrets, so it’s understandable that they did not leave written instruction manuals lying around.

But numerous ancient Greek historians interviewed Egyptian embalmers. Such writers include Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch, and they included fascinating details about how mummifications were conducted.

Given that we couldn’t be sure if the Greeks wrote down everything correctly—or, indeed, whether the embalmers they interviewed were even telling them the truth—a researcher named Bob Brier used a human cadaver to perform a mummification in the 1990s. Brier followed the details provided by the Greek writers, as well as pharaonic records to make sure he was using all of the correct supplies and tools. The experiment was a grand success—Brier was the first person to mummify a body in the Egyptian manner in over a millennia. The experiment was recently duplicated in Great Britain, on a man who was terminally ill and had requested that his body by mummified.

In total, the evidence for mummification is insurmountable. It’s quite odd that nonesense would question it. As I see it, this approach doesn’t even fit well with his whole ancient-giant theme, but in fact goes even farther to discredit it. One simply cannot question something so obvious and come out still standing.

Nonesense mentions a mummy found in 1898 at Jabalain near the Red Sea. Supposedly this mummy was rushed into a coffin to claim it was “king so and so” when in fact the identity of the mummy was unknown. The facts here are a bit muddled and comprise a mix of fringe whimsy and the faith of Islam.

Many Muslims believe the Pharaoh of Exodus was Ramesses II. Many biblical scholars would concur, although the truth is no one can be sure on that score, nor can anyone be certain that something like the biblical Exodus even happened.

Mummy of Ramesses II, Dynasty 19, putative Pharaoh of Exodus

I am not an expert in Muslim studies and I respectfully invite any Muslim reader to comment on this based on his or her own teachings, but in researching this comment of nonesense I came across numerous web pages of Muslim studies stating that the mummy of Ramesses II was found at this Red Sea site. I am not sure where this information originated, but it is incorrect. The mummy of Ramesses II was one of those found by Émile Brugsch in 1881, in the secondary burial of DB320.

What’s true is that Brugsch was highly concerned that once he fully entered the tomb, Egyptian villagers would quickly descend on the scene to loot the tomb. He excavated the entire tomb in record speed and completely cleared it of its many mummies, in the process taking few notes and recording very little about the archaeological context of everything in DB320 (much to the never-ending frustration of modern archaeologists). All of these mummies and their associated burial equipment were then sent up the Nile to Cairo, for further study in a secure environment.

In other words, the “Jabalain mummy” doesn’t even exist.

I need not comment at all on the implications of ancient giants on the scientific theory of evolution (“Evolution, darwinism is wrong”). If nonesense would think about this for a moment, he might see how abjectly it works against his cause. And it shows a decided lack of understanding about evolution, but that’s a whole other debate.

On the subject of debate, I don’t intend to allow this to become one with nonesense. I feel that a blog just doesn’t work well for such a thing, while message boards are ideal for the purpose. I felt it necessary, however, both to respond to nonesense’s comment and to provide an example to the reader of what the pro-giants crowd believes in. It’s quite stunning.

Thanks for reading.

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In this article I did not follow my usual practice of citing my sources within the body of the article. However, in the interest of providing sources, below is a list of some of the references I used. More details about them can be provided, if desired.